Looking Backward: 2000-1887 Read online

  CHAPTER V.

  When, in the course of the evening the ladies retired, leaving Dr.Leete and myself alone, he sounded me as to my disposition for sleep,saying that if I felt like it my bed was ready for me; but if I wasinclined to wakefulness nothing would please him better than to bearme company. "I am a late bird, myself," he said, "and, withoutsuspicion of flattery, I may say that a companion more interestingthan yourself could scarcely be imagined. It is decidedly not oftenthat one has a chance to converse with a man of the nineteenthcentury."

  Now I had been looking forward all the evening with some dread to thetime when I should be alone, on retiring for the night. Surrounded bythese most friendly strangers, stimulated and supported by theirsympathetic interest, I had been able to keep my mental balance. Eventhen, however, in pauses of the conversation I had had glimpses, vividas lightning flashes, of the horror of strangeness that was waiting tobe faced when I could no longer command diversion. I knew I could notsleep that night, and as for lying awake and thinking, it argues nocowardice, I am sure, to confess that I was afraid of it. When, inreply to my host's question, I frankly told him this, he replied thatit would be strange if I did not feel just so, but that I need have noanxiety about sleeping; whenever I wanted to go to bed, he would giveme a dose which would insure me a sound night's sleep without fail.Next morning, no doubt, I would awake with the feeling of an oldcitizen.

  "Before I acquire that," I replied, "I must know a little more aboutthe sort of Boston I have come back to. You told me when we were uponthe house-top that though a century only had elapsed since I fellasleep, it had been marked by greater changes in the conditions ofhumanity than many a previous millennium. With the city before me Icould well believe that, but I am very curious to know what some ofthe changes have been. To make a beginning somewhere, for the subjectis doubtless a large one, what solution, if any, have you found forthe labor question? It was the Sphinx's riddle of the nineteenthcentury, and when I dropped out the Sphinx was threatening to devoursociety, because the answer was not forthcoming. It is well worthsleeping a hundred years to learn what the right answer was, if,indeed, you have found it yet."

  "As no such thing as the labor question is known nowadays," repliedDr. Leete, "and there is no way in which it could arise, I suppose wemay claim to have solved it. Society would indeed have fully deservedbeing devoured if it had failed to answer a riddle so entirely simple.In fact, to speak by the book, it was not necessary for society tosolve the riddle at all. It may be said to have solved itself. Thesolution came as the result of a process of industrial evolution whichcould not have terminated otherwise. All that society had to do was torecognize and cooperate with that evolution, when its tendency hadbecome unmistakable."

  "I can only say," I answered, "that at the time I fell asleep no suchevolution had been recognized."

  "It was in 1887 that you fell into this sleep, I think you said."

  "Yes, May 30th, 1887."

  My companion regarded me musingly for some moments. Then he observed,"And you tell me that even then there was no general recognition ofthe nature of the crisis which society was nearing? Of course, I fullycredit your statement. The singular blindness of your contemporariesto the signs of the times is a phenomenon commented on by many of ourhistorians, but few facts of history are more difficult for us torealize, so obvious and unmistakable as we look back seem theindications, which must also have come under your eyes, of thetransformation about to come to pass. I should be interested, Mr.West, if you would give me a little more definite idea of the viewwhich you and men of your grade of intellect took of the state andprospects of society in 1887. You must, at least, have realized thatthe widespread industrial and social troubles, and the underlyingdissatisfaction of all classes with the inequalities of society, andthe general misery of mankind, were portents of great changes of somesort."

  "We did, indeed, fully realize that," I replied. "We felt that societywas dragging anchor and in danger of going adrift. Whither it woulddrift nobody could say, but all feared the rocks."

  "Nevertheless," said Dr. Leete, "the set of the current was perfectlyperceptible if you had but taken pains to observe it, and it was nottoward the rocks, but toward a deeper channel."

  "We had a popular proverb," I replied, "that 'hindsight is better thanforesight,' the force of which I shall now, no doubt, appreciate morefully than ever. All I can say is, that the prospect was such when Iwent into that long sleep that I should not have been surprised had Ilooked down from your house-top to-day on a heap of charred andmoss-grown ruins instead of this glorious city."

  Dr. Leete had listened to me with close attention and noddedthoughtfully as I finished speaking. "What you have said," heobserved, "will be regarded as a most valuable vindication of Storiot,whose account of your era has been generally thought exaggerated inits picture of the gloom and confusion of men's minds. That a periodof transition like that should be full of excitement and agitation wasindeed to be looked for; but seeing how plain was the tendency of theforces in operation, it was natural to believe that hope rather thanfear would have been the prevailing temper of the popular mind."

  "You have not yet told me what was the answer to the riddle which youfound," I said. "I am impatient to know by what contradiction ofnatural sequence the peace and prosperity which you now seem to enjoycould have been the outcome of an era like my own."

  "Excuse me," replied my host, "but do you smoke?" It was not till ourcigars were lighted and drawing well that he resumed. "Since you arein the humor to talk rather than to sleep, as I certainly am, perhapsI cannot do better than to try to give you enough idea of our modernindustrial system to dissipate at least the impression that there isany mystery about the process of its evolution. The Bostonians of yourday had the reputation of being great askers of questions, and I amgoing to show my descent by asking you one to begin with. What shouldyou name as the most prominent feature of the labor troubles of yourday?"

  "Why, the strikes, of course," I replied.

  "Exactly; but what made the strikes so formidable?"

  "The great labor organizations."

  "And what was the motive of these great organizations?"

  "The workmen claimed they had to organize to get their rights from thebig corporations," I replied.

  "That is just it," said Dr. Leete; "the organization of labor and thestrikes were an effect, merely, of the concentration of capital ingreater masses than had ever been known before. Before thisconcentration began, while as yet commerce and industry were conductedby innumerable petty concerns with small capital, instead of a smallnumber of great concerns with vast capital, the individual workman wasrelatively important and independent in his relations to the employer.Moreover, when a little capital or a new idea was enough to start aman in business for himself, workingmen were constantly becomingemployers and there was no hard and fast line between the two classes.Labor unions were needless then, and general strikes out of thequestion. But when the era of small concerns with small capital wassucceeded by that of the great aggregations of capital, all this waschanged. The individual laborer, who had been relatively important tothe small employer, was reduced to insignificance and powerlessnessover against the great corporation, while at the same time the wayupward to the grade of employer was closed to him. Self-defense drovehim to union with his fellows.

  "The records of the period show that the outcry against theconcentration of capital was furious. Men believed that it threatenedsociety with a form of tyranny more abhorrent than it had everendured. They believed that the great corporations were preparing forthem the yoke of a baser servitude than had ever been imposed on therace, servitude not to men but to soulless machines incapable of anymotive but insatiable greed. Looking back, we cannot wonder at theirdesperation, for certainly humanity was never confronted with a fatemore sordid and hideous than would have been the era of corporatetyranny which they anticipated.

  "Meanwhile, without being in the smallest degree checked by the clamoraga
inst it, the absorption of business by ever larger monopoliescontinued. In the United States there was not, after the beginning ofthe last quarter of the century, any opportunity whatever forindividual enterprise in any important field of industry, unlessbacked by a great capital. During the last decade of the century, suchsmall businesses as still remained were fast-failing survivals of apast epoch, or mere parasites on the great corporations, or elseexisted in fields too small to attract the great capitalists. Smallbusinesses, as far as they still remained, were reduced to thecondition of rats and mice, living in holes and corners, and countingon evading notice for the enjoyment of existence. The railroads hadgone on combining till a few great syndicates controlled every rail inthe land. In manufactories, every important staple was controlled by asyndicate. These syndicates, pools, trusts, or whatever their name,fixed prices and crushed all competition except when combinations asvast as themselves arose. Then a struggle, resulting in a stillgreater consolidation, ensued. The great city bazar crushed itscountry rivals with branch stores, and in the city itself absorbed itssmaller rivals till the business of a whole quarter was concentratedunder one roof, with a hundred former proprietors of shops serving asclerks. Having no business of his own to put his money in, the smallcapitalist, at the same time that he took service under thecorporation, found no other investment for his money but its stocksand bonds, thus becoming doubly dependent upon it.

  "The fact that the desperate popular opposition to the consolidationof business in a few powerful hands had no effect to check it provesthat there must have been a strong economical reason for it. The smallcapitalists, with their innumerable petty concerns, had in factyielded the field to the great aggregations of capital, because theybelonged to a day of small things and were totally incompetent to thedemands of an age of steam and telegraphs and the gigantic scale ofits enterprises. To restore the former order of things, even ifpossible, would have involved returning to the day of stage-coaches.Oppressive and intolerable as was the regime of the greatconsolidations of capital, even its victims, while they cursed it,were forced to admit the prodigious increase of efficiency which hadbeen imparted to the national industries, the vast economies effectedby concentration of management and unity of organization, and toconfess that since the new system had taken the place of the old thewealth of the world had increased at a rate before undreamed of. To besure this vast increase had gone chiefly to make the rich richer,increasing the gap between them and the poor; but the fact remainedthat, as a means merely of producing wealth, capital had been provedefficient in proportion to its consolidation. The restoration of theold system with the subdivision of capital, if it were possible, mightindeed bring back a greater equality of conditions, with moreindividual dignity and freedom, but it would be at the price ofgeneral poverty and the arrest of material progress.

  "Was there, then, no way of commanding the services of the mightywealth-producing principle of consolidated capital without bowing downto a plutocracy like that of Carthage? As soon as men began to askthemselves these questions, they found the answer ready for them. Themovement toward the conduct of business by larger and largeraggregations of capital, the tendency toward monopolies, which hadbeen so desperately and vainly resisted, was recognized at last, inits true significance, as a process which only needed to complete itslogical evolution to open a golden future to humanity.

  "Early in the last century the evolution was completed by the finalconsolidation of the entire capital of the nation. The industry andcommerce of the country, ceasing to be conducted by a set ofirresponsible corporations and syndicates of private persons at theircaprice and for their profit, were intrusted to a single syndicaterepresenting the people, to be conducted in the common interest forthe common profit. The nation, that is to say, organized as the onegreat business corporation in which all other corporations wereabsorbed; it became the one capitalist in the place of all othercapitalists, the sole employer, the final monopoly in which allprevious and lesser monopolies were swallowed up, a monopoly in theprofits and economies of which all citizens shared. The epoch oftrusts had ended in The Great Trust. In a word, the people of theUnited States concluded to assume the conduct of their own business,just as one hundred odd years before they had assumed the conduct oftheir own government, organizing now for industrial purposes onprecisely the same grounds that they had then organized for politicalpurposes. At last, strangely late in the world's history, the obviousfact was perceived that no business is so essentially the publicbusiness as the industry and commerce on which the people's livelihooddepends, and that to entrust it to private persons to be managed forprivate profit is a folly similar in kind, though vastly greater inmagnitude, to that of surrendering the functions of politicalgovernment to kings and nobles to be conducted for their personalglorification."

  "Such a stupendous change as you describe," said I, "did not, ofcourse, take place without great bloodshed and terrible convulsions."

  "On the contrary," replied Dr. Leete, "there was absolutely noviolence. The change had been long foreseen. Public opinion had becomefully ripe for it, and the whole mass of the people was behind it.There was no more possibility of opposing it by force than byargument. On the other hand the popular sentiment toward the greatcorporations and those identified with them had ceased to be one ofbitterness, as they came to realize their necessity as a link, atransition phase, in the evolution of the true industrial system. Themost violent foes of the great private monopolies were now forced torecognize how invaluable and indispensable had been their office ineducating the people up to the point of assuming control of their ownbusiness. Fifty years before, the consolidation of the industries ofthe country under national control would have seemed a very daringexperiment to the most sanguine. But by a series of object lessons,seen and studied by all men, the great corporations had taught thepeople an entirely new set of ideas on this subject. They had seen formany years syndicates handling revenues greater than those of states,and directing the labors of hundreds of thousands of men with anefficiency and economy unattainable in smaller operations. It had cometo be recognized as an axiom that the larger the business the simplerthe principles that can be applied to it; that, as the machine istruer than the hand, so the system, which in a great concern does thework of the master's eye in a small business, turns out more accurateresults. Thus it came about that, thanks to the corporationsthemselves, when it was proposed that the nation should assume theirfunctions, the suggestion implied nothing which seemed impracticableeven to the timid. To be sure it was a step beyond any yet taken, abroader generalization, but the very fact that the nation would be thesole corporation in the field would, it was seen, relieve theundertaking of many difficulties with which the partial monopolies hadcontended."